Flash News

TREE NEWS reports: Chinese AI model developer DeepSeek is set to close its second funding round at roughly 100 billion yuan, doubled from the 50 billion yuan planned less than two weeks ago, people involved in the deal said. New and existing shareholders are each taking about half, and the larger round did not change the pre-money valuation, still about 500 billion yuan.

TREE NEWS reports: Microsoft has reorganized its Azure cloud computing division as part of a broader transformation of its business around AI. The restructuring reshapes the unit that houses the company’s cloud infrastructure, which underpins its AI services. Microsoft has not disclosed financial terms or the number of roles affected.

TREE NEWS reports: JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs arranged a $5 billion debt financing for AI cloud startup Volta Infrastructure Holdings while limiting their own exposure, underwriting $1.3 billion of term loans but not the remaining $3.7 billion in chip loans. The debt carries a yield of about 11%, among the highest borrowing costs in the leveraged loan market tied to AI financing, as investors demand higher returns on high-risk AI-related debt.

TREE NEWS update: Tencent has begun marketing US dollar and offshore yuan bonds expected to raise about $5 billion to fund its growing artificial-intelligence investments. The company set initial price guidance for its 10-year and 20-year dollar notes at roughly 115 and 140 basis points over comparable US Treasuries, and is also marketing 10-year and 30-year offshore yuan bonds at around 2.9% and 3.5%. The bonds could price as early as Tuesday.

TREE NEWS reports: Indian AI startup Sarvam is in talks to raise $250 million to $300 million in a new funding round at a valuation of $3 billion. The company is negotiating the round, which would be among the largest for an Indian AI firm.

TREE NEWS update: Meta released its Muse Wonder model series, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying the company has caught up to the AI industry’s frontier and will keep increasing spending on compute, infrastructure and talent. Meta says Muse Wonder outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 on some benchmarks, targeting complex coding, financial analysis and personal AI assistants. It is closed-source and paid: from $0.20 per million tokens, with the premium Muse Wonder Full tier costing up to $200 a month.

TREE NEWS reports: After about three years of concept hype and early rollouts, AI phones have entered a stable growth phase, with major brands converging on a clearer roadmap. Rather than competing with apps for AI traffic gateways, handset makers are now building personal-intelligence ecosystems with internet companies through various protocol-based partnerships. Competition has shifted to system-level capabilities spanning hardware, software, ecosystem and services.

TREE NEWS update: SpaceX is integrating subscription plans for Grok, Cursor and X, consolidating the three services into a single offering. The move links xAI’s AI chatbot, the AI coding tool Cursor and the social platform X under one subscription structure. No pricing, launch date or further terms were disclosed.

TREE NEWS reports: The chief executives of Intel and Broadcom warned that access to financing could become the main constraint on the AI boom, as demand for computing infrastructure continues to outstrip supply. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said capital may prove a bigger obstacle to expansion than shortages of semiconductors, memory chips or power, speaking Monday at the DBS Asia Future Forward conference in Singapore. “I think the biggest constraint is probably capital,” Tan said.

TREE NEWS update: The New York Times, Agence France-Presse and The Economist joined more than 40 other publishers on Monday in the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights (SPUR) coalition, which aims to stop AI companies from using their content without permission or profiting from it. SPUR was founded in February and now counts over 80 members from more than 20 countries. The Atlantic and Brazil’s national newspaper association are among the new members, joining founders including the Financial Times, the BBC and the Associated Press.

TREE NEWS reports: IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva said AI investment is holding global growth near 3%, with Asian chipmakers the biggest beneficiaries, while warning the technology poses a “slow-moving tsunami” for young workers. She put the share of jobs exposed to AI at 40%, with young people first in line for disruption.

TREE NEWS update: Google and Planet launched a Project Suncatcher prototype satellite on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 mission, confirming the “sun-chaser” satellite is operating as expected. The mission covers a prototype for the project, which pairs Google with satellite imagery firm Planet.

TREE NEWS reports: Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team says small AI models could achieve self-replication without data centers within months using cheap IoT devices. In tests, a 9B-parameter model deployed inference services on 8 of 9 hardware types, and Gemma4-26B-A4B ran distributed across 15 Android TV boxes priced at about $55 each. Anthropic says GLM-5.2 and stronger models already have end-to-end replication capability, with small models projected to reach that level by end-2026, though doubling times are measured in days.

TREE NEWS reports: FTX’s crypto mining venture is now being used to advance AI, the defunct exchange having acquired a 20% stake in Genesis Digital Assets before declaring bankruptcy in November 2022. The stake in the bitcoin miner represents one of the failed exchange’s remaining assets.

TREE NEWS update: Applied Materials said AI demand will drive the company’s sales to double, without giving a timeframe for the target. The semiconductor equipment maker attributed the forecast to growth tied to artificial intelligence. No further figures or dates were disclosed.

TREE NEWS update: Meta’s new flagship model, Muse, outperforms GPT-6 Astra and Claude on memory, legal and marathon coding benchmarks, marking the company’s entry into the frontier AI race. Independent rankings, however, still place Anthropic’s Opus 5.5 in first place. No release date or pricing details were given.

TREE NEWS update: Epic Games has delayed a shooter featuring Marvel and Star Wars characters developed with Disney, originally slated for March 2027, and is requiring the project team to adopt an AI-first production model using tools including Anthropic’s Claude with human oversight throughout. The game director told the team in an internal message to stop hand-writing code and said all art would be generated via a fully AI workflow, shocking some staff. Epic communications director Jake Jones said the company is embracing AI-accelerated development led by Epic developers.

TREE NEWS update: Navitas Semiconductor (NVTS) unveiled a 24 kW, 800 V-to-12 V DC-DC power board built with its GaNFast technology and developed in collaboration with Nvidia. The board is designed to support the NVIDIA MGX ecosystem and advance 800 V DC power delivery architecture in AI data centers. It is scheduled to be shown at the NVIDIA AI Factory MGX Wall partner showcase at the 2026 OCP Global Summit.

TREE NEWS update: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has filed a lawsuit against Amazon over data center computing chip security technology. The suit concerns technology used in chips for data centers. No further details of the claim were disclosed.

TREE NEWS reports: REA, a free toolkit that gives AI agents reverse-engineering capabilities, passed 100,000 GitHub stars within a week of release. The project’s output has already produced AI-decompiled game mods, console ports and Adobe software clones circulating online, including a version of GTA V running on iPhone.